In Some Places, Local Search Beating Google 216
babooo404 points out Newsweek coverage of Google focusing on areas in which the search giant may be vulnerable. In some countries outside the US, local competition is handing Google its head. In South Korea a company called Naver dominates. And in Russia, portal site Yandex leads in both search and advertising. In the Cyrillic language market Google is a distant third in search, and Yandex is trouncing Google in the advertising arena by 70% to 2%.
Too western? (Score:4, Interesting)
It would be interesting to get the view of someone in South Korea, for instance, as to how useful Google is to them when compared with local/regional alternatives?
It's more than likely that Google is far too orientated around the West, both culturally and in terms of results.
Character sets? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Gotta Love It (Score:5, Interesting)
As a Korean (Score:5, Interesting)
The biggest reason is because Naver actually hosts content, rather than just indexing content. Not only that Naver is a strong search engine company, it hosts a vast amount of blogs, forums, an online game site (Hangame), user-provided knowledge base, plus third-party licensed contents (such as dictionaries, public transportation routes, news contents provided by other medias, etc.). All these contents are prohibited to robots (via robots.txt), which means Google can't even index them. Thus, no matter how great Google's search algorithm is, it will be almost impossible to match Naver's quality.
Plus, running a homepage *that looks cool* is a very complicated job for a non tech-savvy person. Thus, they don't get webhosting - they upload contents to big portals. I've even seen many small businesses forget about homepages, and instead have a blog/user-created forum/whatsoever on every major player. It would be much easier for normal users to reach them (since memorizing a URL written in a non-native language would be painful), and cheaper (near zero) to maintain.
Another downside of Google is that it DISPLAYS English search results, which would be useless to them. Yes, people are lazy enough to select the 'Search for Korean contents only'.
In terms of actual users, I believe Google would fall even further behind (far behind 10th place), since there is another big portal cyworld (http://cyworld.com/), which provides personal blogging services and web-based communities.
I use many different searching methods
- Naver or Yahoo for local information (public transport route, looking for a place for a nice dinner, etc.)
- Wikipedia for something that's expected to exist on an encyclopedia
- danawa.com and enuri.com for searching best deals (equivalent to PriceGrabber or whatsoever)
- Naver for anything else in Korean
- Google for everything else, or if all methods above doesn't give a good enough result.
As a result, I get to use google less and wikipedia more, while naver and everything else remains somewhat constant.
The reason why NAVER in Korea tops google (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Gotta Love It (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Gotta Love It (Score:2, Interesting)
I think Google is special. They were the first decent webmail service (ie they offered more than 10 megs or whatever, no annoying ads, POP3 access etc). They offer free mobile phone apps to read Gmail, or use Google maps. The language translation works. Google groups is great - ok, it's a bit buggy and you can't employ killfiles, but there's no other way that I know of to search Usenet archives, and it's pretty quick at that.
That's what I use - I'm sure other people use other features that I've not noticed/used. For all Microsoft's braying about innovation, they just do podgy, uncool stuff, or buy up other people's stuff and then fuck it up. Yahoo are playing catch-up in the search/email area (are they still attaching World Cup 2006 sigfiles to outgoing emails? How amusing!).
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Ignoring robots.txt (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.ewhisper.net/blog/msn-ignoring-robotstxt-files/ [ewhisper.net]
There are ways to block search engines that do this..
http://www.ars.net/bots/ [ars.net]
Google is also blocked by some filters (Score:2, Interesting)
This is NOT a widespread epidemic, but it has occurred occasionally at various internet rooms around the country under different ownership (ie: not a chain). As someone else mentioned, Naver has brand strength (company commercials approach it very similarly to the way AOL used keywords), but these sorts of filtering anomalies don't hurt.
Re:Too western? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Please NO! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:In Soviet Russia the currency transfer trounce (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.ipmce.su/~lib/osn_prav.html [ipmce.su]
I used to have a "legit" version at my old house (no access to it at the mo) which was printed by Moscow State. It was 35-40 pages in total with the preface and the contents.
By the way, when I taught Russian in the USA nearly 20 years ago I had that trimmed to 10 pages for the beginners.
The problem I found with it is that most English students of foreign languages are humanity students which are heavily into memorising and not trying to use rules and logic. They can memorise any number of phrases, the most obscure lexics, etc but they cannot memorise and use formal grammar. At all. As a result they have no problem with French, Spanish, etc but with Russian they hit a wall and run away screaming that it is too hard.